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Gr_Del4's avatar
Gr_Del4
Copper Contributor
Feb 24, 2025

Excel 365 Stock Data Type Frustrations

Fellow Excel users,

I'm hitting major roadblocks with the Stock data type in Excel 365 that seem to defeat its purpose:

  1. Excel refuses to accept anything but plain text as a stock ticker. Even a simple formula like =B1 to reference a ticker from another cell is rejected.
  2. There's no way to pre-format a column as the Stock data type. Each new ticker requires manual formatting, even when Excel correctly identifies it as a stock.

These limitations make it impossible to create an auto-expanding list of stocks. What's the point of this "smart" feature if it requires so much manual work? Has anyone found workarounds for these issues, or are we all stuck with these limitations?

Any advice appreciated before I abandon this feature completely.

Thanks,

excel
office 365

1 Reply

  • mathetes's avatar
    mathetes
    Gold Contributor
    Mar 03, 2025

    See if this link is helpful. 

    Beyond that, I have a spreadsheet that uses STOCKHISTORY to retrieve prices from past dates (as recent as yesterday) and I am consistently referring to the stock symbol as it appears in a different cell. This is the formula,

    =STOCKHISTORY($C$2,$B35,,,0,3,4)

    which retrieves the high and low prices for the stock specified in $C$2 and the date specified in $B35.

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